Thursday, April 07, 2011

For Israel-bashers, recantation is heresy


Melanie Phillips

The reaction to Richard Goldstone’s recantation of his infamous report has been as instructive as it is predictable. The haters of Israel will not allow the facts to get in the way of the hate – even when the very author of the report they have used to foment that hate has now recanted his pivotal allegation and pulled the rug from under their feet.

In his article, Goldstone says he now accepts that Israel did not intentionally kill civilians in Gaza. The most terrible element of his report was the assertion that it had done so, turning Israel’s actions in Cast Lead from a justifiable defence of its citizens against attack into a monstrous and evil intention to kill the innocent, and thus opening up the suggestion it may have committed crimes against humanity. That is the blood libel against Israel which is used over and over again to delegitimise any Israeli military defence against attack and intended genocide, and thus make it unable to defend itself. And it is that diabolical inversion, for which Goldstone provided rocket fuel, which underpinned the thrust of his report. That claim placed Israel on the same moral plane as the murderous terrorists whose aim is indeed to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. It thus delegitimises not just Israel’s self-defence but Israel itself, and turns it into a moral pariah -- whose own eradication is therefore implicitly to be justified. For Goldstone now to recant this claim – and to say into the bargain that the UN Human Rights Council which commissioned him is prejudiced against Israel and thus by implication cannot ever be trusted as an impartial arbiter of such matters – not only vitiates his report but calls into question the UNHRC and all those in Britain, America and Europe who treat its lethal bullying of Israel and malevolent distortions of international law as unquestionably justified.

So this recantation, given the appalling consequences of what has now been withdrawn, is an event of considerable magnitude. For the Israel-bashers, it is a terrible blow to their whole platform of hate – such a blow, indeed, that they have to find ways of pretending it hasn’t happened. This requires the kind of brazen intellectual legerdemain which, for those whose attitude to Israel is based on lies and hatred, is second nature.

The UK government, for example, sees no reason why Goldstone’s recantation should cause it to abandon its endorsement of the Goldstone report. Not even the bits about deliberate killing of civilians and possible crimes against humanity. The Jerusalem Post reported:

The British government said that while Goldstone’s acknowledgment, and what he said in the opinion piece, is important, it was not the only report on the 22-day conflict.

And then its spokesman added:

...it was the actual report that set up a process that allowed for clarity and accountability into the conflict. Justice Goldstone makes clear in his recent comments that the Goldstone report would have looked differently if it had been produced now, on the basis of fresh evidence released by a committee of independent experts, tasked to follow-up on the Goldstone report. This latest insight into the events surrounding the Gaza conflict have come about because of the process that was set in train by his Fact Finding Mission,’ he said.

Can you believe this?! The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office is saying that it is only because Goldstone wrote his report that we now have the information that enables us to see that the report promulgated a falsehood -- and so therefore the report is still just as important!

Yesterday’s report in The Commentator contained a most revealing quote about the FCO position on Goldstone.

One diplomat told The Commentator that his [Goldstone’s] retractions would cause acute embarrassment to countries such as Britain that stand accused by Israel and its supporters of adopting a reflexively anti-Israeli position in order to placate oil rich Arab states in the Middle East, as well as Britain’s growing Muslim population.

In other words, nothing – certainly not the unravelling of a blood libel -- can be allowed to stop Britain continuing to make use of that libel and other untruths in the demonisation of Israel. Foreign Secretary William Hague was at it again yesterday, when he condemned Israel’s decision to approve more than 900 housing units for Israelis in the East Jerusalem suburb of Gilo and the retrospective approval given for further such construction in five other disputed terrritory areas. Said Hague:

This is not disputed territory. It is occupied Palestinian territory and ongoing settlement expansion is illegal under international law, an obstacle to peace and a threat to a two state solution.

'Occupied Palestinian territory’? But there is no Palestinian territory, because there is not, and never has been, a sovereign state of Palestine to own anything at all. It is in effect ‘no-man’s land’ – which is why the only neutral and accurate way to describe it is indeed ‘disputed territories’. Who can be surprised that the British Foreign Office still supports the falsehoods in the Goldstone report - even after its author has himself repudiated them -- when it is guilty of such legal, historical and moral illiteracy?

If the FCO is so desperate not to be exposed as peddling murderous falsehoods that it dismisses Goldstone’s recantation, how much more so for the NGOs which fed Goldstone the false information in the first place. The Israeli anti-Israel activists B’Tselem are even now still peddling false claims about the number of Gazan civilian casualties in Cast Lead -- seemingly regardless of the fact that Hamas itself has now finally admitted what the Israeli authorities said all along, that the majority of those killed were terrorists. In its final report on the Cast Lead casualties in 2009, B’Tselem claimed:

According to B'Tselem's research, Israeli security forces killed 1,387 Palestinians during the course of the three-week operation. Of these, 773 did not take part in the hostilities, including 320 minors and 109 women over the age of 18. Of those killed, 330 took part in the hostilities, and 248 were Palestinian police officers, most of whom were killed in aerial bombings of police stations on the first day of the operation. For 36 people, B'Tselem could not determine whether they participated in the hostilities or not.

As NGO Monitor has reported, however, not only did the Israeli military state that of 1166 Palestinian deaths, 709 were combatants – a ratio of combatant to civilian which was outstanding considering Hamas were using Gazan civilians as human shields -- but in a November 2010 interview in Al-Hayat Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad finally acknowledged that, contrary to original Hamas claims that the vast majority killed during Cast Lead were civilians, in fact 600-700 Hamas members were killed.

Moreover, Fathi Hamad also admitted that the police officers killed on the first day of the operation, when Israel attacked the police headquarters, were also not civilians; the 250 police operatives killed there belonged to Hamas and other terrorist organizations. And yet in response to Goldstone’s retraction B’Tselem is still claiming:

However, it is imperative to note that in operation Cast Lead Israel killed 758 Palestinian civilians who did not take part in the hostilities, 318 of them minors.

Then there’s the strange case of the New York Times, which as CAMERA observes, despite having previously published Goldstone’s three previous op-eds appears to have turned this one down – simply because it vitiated the anti-Israel witch-hunt that passes for journalism at the New York Times. CAMERA reports:

The New York Times acknowledges that it rejected an Op-Ed submitted by Mr. Goldstone for publication on March 22, but claims it was different from the retraction that appeared in the Washington Post.

Ah! Doubtless the op-ed Goldstone submitted to the NYT was all about the vintage of the wines served in the UN’s restaurants – and only when that was turned down did he decide to retract his report’s blood libel for the Washington Post. As Camera goes on:

They [the NYT] did not seem to exhibit similar reluctance in publishing Mr. Goldstone's first Op-Ed on September 17, 2009. That column, titled ‘Justice in Gaza,’ criticized Israel for carrying out ‘disproportionate attacks’ on military targets and for ‘fail[ing] to adequately distinguish between combatants and civilians, as the laws of war strictly require.’ It also predicted that any investigation by Israel was ‘unlikely to be serious and objective’ – sentiments that are perhaps more in line with the New York Times’ overall approach to covering the Arab-Israeli conflict, which tends toward criticism of Israel.

And then there’s the Guardian. As expected, it too sought to play down the significance of Goldstone’s retraction. But in its editorial, it first referred to

Richard Goldstone's retraction of one of the claims of the report that he chaired – that Israel targeted civilians in the war on Gaza as a matter of policy

and praised him for his honesty; but then went on:

The report did not in fact claim that Israel set out deliberately to murder civilians. It said that Operation Cast Lead was ‘deliberately disproportionate’ and intended to ‘punish, humiliate and terrorise’.

But this is simply not true. The report said both. It stated, for example:

...the Mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility. It also finds that the direct targeting and arbitrary killing of Palestinian civilians is a violation of the right to life.

Indeed that is why Goldstone said in his recantation:

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion.

Oh dear. All that cognitive dissonance must be such a strain. To be fair, the Guardian also carries a piece by Jonathan Freedland who – despite also recycling the false ‘more than 700 non-combatants killed’ figure, makes the key point that the real villain of the piece is the UN Human Rights Council:

That sounds like an eminently respectable body – until you look at its record. A 2010 analysis showed that very nearly half of all the resolutions it had passed related to Israel: 32 out of 67. And guess which country is the only one to be under permanent review, on the agenda for every single meeting? Israel. There is only one rapporteur whose mandate never expires. No, it's not the person charged with probing Belarus, North Korea or Saudi Arabia, despite the hideous human rights records of those nations. It is Israel. The UNHRC, whose predecessor body was once, laughably, chaired by Libya, had originally asked Goldstone to probe just one side of the Gaza war: it was only the judge's own insistence that he investigate Hamas too that widened his remit. No wonder Goldstone says now of the body he served that its ‘history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted’.

We can laugh at an organisation so potty it would put a murderous tyrant like Muammar Gaddafi in charge of monitoring human rights around the globe. But in its belief that no country in the world behaves worse or matters more, a belief expressed by the sheer volume of attention it pays to Israel, it reflects a view that is alarmingly widespread.

Very true; and nowhere is it more widespread, of course, than in the pages of the Guardian.

And finally there is Goldstone himself. Lo and behold, he appears to be recanting his own recantation -- doubtless under enormous pressure from the Israel-haters, who simply cannot allow him to recant his own falsehoods. Indeed, from a report in Ha’aretz it appears the pressure seems to have got to him too rather badly. For in the Washington Post, he wrote:

If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document

because he now believed that, on Israel’s part,

civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

Yet one day later he told Ha’aretz:

‘As appears from the Washington Post article, information subsequent to publication of the report did meet with the view that one correction should be made with regard to intentionality on the part of Israel...Further information as a result of domestic investigations could lead to further reconsideration, but as presently advised I have no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time.'

So first he claims Israel deliberately killed civilians and might therefore be guilty of crimes against humanity; then he says he now realises this was not the case and he would have written a different report had he known this at the time; now he says he nevertheless sees no reason to reconsider any part of his report.

How can this man have any credibility at all?

But he cannot unwrite what he wrote in the Washington Post. The fact remains that he has pulled the rug from under his own feet, and from under the feet of all who either helped promote or rode on the back of his vile assertions – NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and the rest, along with the British government, the Guardian, New York Times, BBC and Uncle Tom Israel-basher and all.

However they squirm and dissemble and bully Goldstone back into line, the fact remains that he has shown the world that they were all willing parties to a blood libel – and if they attempt to use Goldstone’s report again, his own words can be thrown back in their faces. The lie has been rumbled. And that is ammunition that can be used.

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